Idi Amin Part 3: ‘Big Daddy’ Seizes Power
56:02 Share

Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. For

$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. It's around 3:30 p.m. on May the 23rd, 1966. Like ancient Rome, the Ugandan city of Kampala was founded amidst seven hills. A column of armored vehicles rumbles up one of these slopes in the plush suburb of Mengo Hill. Their destination is a grand white stone building that sits at the summit.

This is the Lubiri Palace. It's the home of the Kabaka. He is the monarch who governs Buganda with the bee. The 800-year-old kingdom within a kingdom, around which the Republic of Uganda, without the bee, has coalesced. His people revere him, but these soldiers, chugging up the hill in their armored cars, are not here to pay homage. Standing up in the lead jeep is Colonel Idi Amin.

He's on his way to kick out the Kabaka by any means necessary. If he can't take him alive, then he'll bring him in dead. This is part three of the Idi Amin story. And this is Real Dictators. Inside the Lubiri Palace, on the hilltop, the Kabaka's personal guard, 120 or so men, prepare to defend the compound to the death.

Throughout the night, from the palace, came the sound of raw buckskin being thumped relentlessly. The sacred, royal war drums. The Mujaguzo drums. It was the Kabaka calling upon the citizens of Buganda to rise up and shield their king against the tyranny of Uganda's new prime minister, Apollo Milton Obote. Having previously maintained an uneasy political alliance, the two men are at each other's throats.

Obote recently declared that he himself, not the kabaka, holds the title of president. The kabaka has responded by demanding the prime minister step down from office and leave his kingdom immediately. This has prompted Obote to dispatch his tooled-up henchman, Idi Amin, to the royal headquarters. This is high stakes poker. It's a question now of who will fold. For the men of the Ugandan army, professional soldiers,

The Kabaka's makeshift roadblocks present little difficulty. They easily beat off any resistance. Reaching the summit, at Colonel Amin's command, the military vehicles take up strategic positions around the Lubiri Palace. Beneath the palm trees, all is still. There are bright gold domes crowning the palace towers. The damp red earth of the driveway steams in the afternoon heat. Bright blue starlings flit in and out of the thorny scrub, as if parts of the script were

There are menacing dark clouds forming across Lake Victoria. The air becomes thick, the sky leaden, on the verge of another monsoon rain. Then, a faint blur within the compound. Movement behind the windows. Outside, guns raised. Amin's soldiers wait for the order. Amin takes a call on his field telephone. This is it. It's official.

Prime Minister Obote has decreed that the Kabaka's antics amount to an act of sedition. The colonel waves his arm. One of the 122mm cannon mounted on the jeeps looses off a round. It punches a hole in the old walls. Amin then takes a turn to fire one himself, laughing uproariously as he does so. The wall caves and crumbles. The Battle of Mango Hill is underway. It'll prove a pivotal moment in Ugandan history.

The new country is now at war with the old. Right on cue, the heavens open. The rain lashes in hard, so thick you can barely see more than a few yards ahead. The red earth churns to mud. The banana trees flap crazily in the howling wind. The Kabaka's guards appear, lightly armed, darting for cover in the cloudburst. Desperate to find a way out, they're mown down at will.

Within an hour or so, the defenders are dead. All have surrendered. But their leader is nowhere to be seen. The Kabaka himself, in the torrential downpour, some say with outside assistance, has made a miraculous escape. Somehow he manages to clamber over a real wall, sneak down to the main road, and hail a taxi. Screeching away from the battlefield, he heads to a church. The clergy give him refuge.

Then they disguise him as a fellow priest and begin the process of smuggling him out of the country. Kabaka Mutesa II, King Freddy, is spirited away by loyalists, crossing to the relative safety of neighboring Burundi. After brief stays in Nairobi and Alisababa, he will travel on to London. The Kabaka is one of the fortunate ones. Through the course of the day, around 400 of his fellow Bagandans will be gunned down as the Battle of Mango Hill rages.

Amin's men will even block the members of the Red Cross who are poised to come in and give aid. The bodies will be scooped up into army trucks and dumped into pits. As the red monsoon mud is bulldozed over, it's quite apparent that some are being buried alive. Idi Amin's men head into the palace and loot it, destroying priceless artifacts, including those sacred Mujaguzo drums. As the smoke from Mango Hill wafts over Kampala,

President Milton Obote addresses Uganda's parliament, the National Assembly. "There is nothing to regret," he says. "The oneness of Uganda must be assured." Professor Derek Peterson. They machine gunned elderly people who were sleeping outside the palace, who had been there to kind of show their love for the Kavaka. He deployed the artillery later in the day, which poured shells into this palace full of civilians.

Contemporary observers reported that there were lorries full of bodies that were shipping the dead out of the palace and burying them off in the outskirts of Kampala. Milton Obote, who held a press conference shortly after those events, claimed that in fact the number was around 20 and dismissed it as a kind of simple police action.

Amin was at the center of all of that. We know from a report given by Milton Obote's private secretary that Amin was constantly checking in with President Obote and that he delivered to Obote, after the assault on the palace, the kabaka's crown, his flag, and his uniform, which he brought to Obote's office in a jeep. Idi Amin's blasé assault on the kabaka marks a turning point in the short history of the new republic. It's a coup by any other name.

In the morning, I walked to school and then we were told that they were shooting. And then after school at four o'clock, we knew that there had been a coup and the tanks were driving around everywhere. Obote was the prime minister. Now he became the president, the prime minister, and a ruler for life.

It's a coup. It's an overthrow of a previous system and we have a new system. And so like for us in Buganda, this was a very traumatic time. In London, the exiled monarch petitions the British government to facilitate his return to Uganda. He demands help in restoring Bugandan authority. It comes to no avail, says Abote with a wry chuckle.

I think I can say without any fear of contradiction that we have passed the stage of considering Sir Edward a factor in Ugandan politics. We will leave it at that. Sir Edward, the Kabaka, King Freddy, will die from alcohol poisoning in 1969 in a flat in Rotherhithe, East London. Aged just 45, his family will continue to languish in exile, far from the gilded palace of the tropics.

Dr. Tom Lohman. For me, I think one of the striking features of Uganda's independent history is that the Buganda, who are far and away the largest and arguably most sort of powerful social group in the country, are never in power. And the struggle between whoever is in power and the Buganda kingdom is one of the defining features of Uganda's modern history.

This is one of the crucial moments if we're thinking about the rise and trajectory of Idi Amin. In those struggles to control the country, Aboti makes the army ever bigger, ever stronger, ever more powerful, recruits ever more soldiers into it, and he relies ever more on Idi Amin to lead it and carry out his bidding there as well. The emergency powers used by Milton Aboti to conduct the operation are extended. For the time being, or so he says, all opposition to his rule is suspended.

Martial law is imposed. Uganda is now, to all intents and purposes, a dictatorship. The rival Democratic Party, though locked out of office, continue to rail against Obote. There are demonstrations which are countered with violent reprisals. In the new socialist centralized economy, there are also food shortages. There is widespread discontent on the streets of Kampala. It may have been Idi Amin whose soldiers stormed Mango Hill, who drove out their kabaka,

But it was Milton Obote, they will always remember, who gave the order. After the Battle of Mango Hill, the Obote government legally and politically abolished all of Uganda's kingdoms, rendering them legally, culturally and politically defunct.

The Buganda kingdom, the most powerful and potent of these kingdoms, was divided into four districts. The name Buganda itself was eliminated from public life. It was no longer an administrative category. And over the course of the late 60s, the Obote government becomes increasingly effectively paranoid about Ganda activists.

The Obote government's response to this Ganda activism was to make illegal whole fields of cultural and political life. Fields of cultural life which had formerly been legitimate parts of Ganda people's civil rights that had been formerly part of the allegiance that they'd owed to their king.

that is rituals, ways of speaking, manners of dress, public occasions of all kinds, were all made into evidence of subversion. Idi Amin's own personal power grows in correspondence with the increasing reliance of Obote's government on the security services. Intelligence men proliferate, critics of the government say it becomes a police state, there's spies on every corner. The new Brigadier Amin, promoted once again, goes on a recruitment drive.

He does so largely within his old stomping ground of the north, enlisting fellow Kakwa, Lugbara, and men from the lands bordering southern Sudan. In the wider world, there is concern. Abote's political lurch to the left, and his hardening anti-Western stance, have made him ripe for communist patronage. The ongoing Cold War is now finding new proxies on the African continent.

In British military circles, in the officers' mess, there is quiet chatter. This chap Amin, the one who fought with the King's African rifles, loyal sort. Wouldn't things be better if he were in charge? British and Israeli security services on the hush-hush extend their reach. They are there to lend a hand, just in case he needs it. There are suggestions that the CIA may also be providing intelligence to Amin.

The Uganda People's Congress still provides the fig leaf of democracy for Abote's autocratic rule. But within this party, paranoia is rife. Some in the UPC are mindful of the rise of Idi Amin. He's moved swiftly on to becoming a general now. Every time you look, he's received another promotion. The army seems increasingly to be fashioned in Amin's own image. These critics demand immediate military reform. Abote is too wily to appear visibly suspicious.

He knows he has to keep his friends close and his enemies closer still. He even invites Amin as a star guest at his wedding, where he presents him with a flashy convertible Mercedes. At the same time though, Abote is conducting some off-the-book surveillance. He recruits agents within the armed forces to keep an eye on his old colleague. Idi Amin may not yet appreciate it himself, but he is shaping up as Abote's main rival.

The land down under has never been easier to reach. United Airlines has more flights between the U.S. and Australia than any other U.S. airline, so you can fly nonstop to destinations like Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Explore dazzling cities, savor the very best of Aussie cuisine, and get up close and personal with the wildlife. Who doesn't want to hold a koala? Go to united.com slash Australia to book your adventure.

It's December the 19th, 1969, at the Kampala Hall. Here, at a UPC rally, the mood is celebratory, triumphant. But as Milton Abote and his entourage are leaving the venue, there's a sudden commotion. From behind a tree a shot is fired. On the floor a grenade rolls out. There is panic, confusion. The grenade fails to detonate, but the gunshot is most certainly real.

Amid the ducking and diving, the assailant gets away. All eyes turn to the President. He's been hit. He's on the floor. There is blood on his face. But Abote is extraordinarily lucky. Somehow the bullet, aimed straight at his head, has passed through his cheek and out the other side. It's merely grazed his tongue and knocked out a couple of teeth. It will incapacitate him only temporarily.

Rumors of assassination plots have been rife for weeks, but this is the first overt attempt on Obote's life. One of the bullets passed through his mouth. But other than that, President Obote was uninjured. He was taken off to a hospital. He made a relatively quick return to public life.

But the assassination attempt was in many ways a signal of the seriousness of the opposition that the Obote government faced. The assassins who were arrested were all activists of the defunct kingdom of Buganda. Obote is apoplectic. He passes emergency laws. Anyone brandishing a gun in his presence is to receive an automatic death sentence. Even throwing an egg will get you life imprisonment.

A hasty police investigation concludes that responsibility for the attack lies with a man named Benedicto Kiwanuka, leader of the Democratic Party. He is thrown in jail. Apote doubles down on security. He establishes his own secret police, the General Service Unit, the GSU. But there is still an air of mystery surrounding the attempted assassination.

Idi Amin had been present at the rally, but then, along with several of his officer colleagues, he'd gone missing just at the crucial moment. Apparently he fled without his shoes, climbing over a barbed wire fence into the street. He then hitched a lift away from the area, all the way to Bombo, 30 miles away. He could not be contacted when the call to arms went out either. In early January 1970, Abote returns to work.

Brigadier Pierino Ieri Okoya, second in command to Amin, confides to Obote what many now suspect. It was Amin who was behind the assassination attempt. On January 25th, when Okoya and his wife are found dead, gunned down in the doorway of their home, it seems more than just coincidence. This time, the killers are caught. They claim that they were paid by a middleman, someone acting, possibly, on behalf of Idi Amin.

Charging Amin is not so easy. There is no concrete evidence. Plus, taking down the second most powerful man in the country, one with the army at his back, must be done delicately. Abota may not have solid proof to nail Amin for this crime, but he knows that any number of things might be used to bring his ally-turned-nemesis to book. Not least, the matter of further embezzlement. Amin's pockets always seem to be bulging with cash.

Quite literally, he often has so many coins and bills stuffed in his trousers that it affects the way he walks. Evidently, he's had his hand in the cookie jar once again. Another 40 million Ugandan shillings have seemingly been misappropriated from the Military Operations Fund. In September 1970, Amin is sent to Cairo to attend the funeral of Egypt's President Nasser. Obote takes the chance to demote Amin to Chief of Just the Army. He, Obote,

will assume the role of commander of the armed forces. With this expanded responsibility, plus his own loyal paramilitary unit, the GSU, Abote now has the firepower to act against Amin if need be. But Abote has a lot on his plate. The role of president comes with the responsibility of representing the fledgling independent Uganda upon the world stage. Even with unrest at home, there will be times when Abote must leave the country to deal with issues of state overseas.

And when he does, who knows what might happen in his absence. We're in Singapore. It's January 25th, 1971. The Commonwealth summit is winding down. It's been a tense few days, with fervent discussion, especially amongst African leaders. Ian Smith and his supporters have unilaterally declared independence for Rhodesia. Britain has begun supplying arms to the apartheid state of South Africa.

For once, Her Majesty the Queen as head of the Commonwealth is not in attendance. It's been deemed prudent for her to keep away. At a swanky five-star hotel, Milktan Obote of Uganda goes about his business in his new role as world leader, discussing policy, giving interviews, smiling, looking relaxed, and why not? Yesterday, he issued a secret order directly to the Uganda army barracks in Jinja. They are to arrest General Idi Amin.

Touching back down in Uganda, Abote assumes he'll be accompanied by the news that Amin is now in jail. He will have avoided the sordid spectacle of having to get involved personally. But then, a phone call. In his absence, General Amin has staged a military coup.

Obote went off to Singapore in January 1971. We know that he wasn't particularly keen on going. He left instructions when he left, apparently, that his defense minister would arrest Idi Amin. None of that happened. In the end, as we know, Idi Amin got the jump on the situation and pulled off the coup before the Obote government could effect his arrest. Obote's order to arrest Amin is received at the Ginger Barracks by a man called Sergeant Musa.

Like Amin, Musa is a northerner, and like Amin, of the Kakwa tribe. Sergeant Musa feels he owes loyalty to a fellow tribesman over the president. So he simply hops into an armoured car and drives straight over to the home of his commanding officer to inform him of the plot. General Amin has spent the day dock shooting at Lake Kyoga, 100 miles away. He returns home to find the excited sergeant waiting for him. Many of the soldiers at Jinja come from the same tribal region.

The sergeant tells Amin that they have no intention of following Obote's orders to arrest their beloved general. Indeed, they've been proactive. They have surrounded the armory and seized the capital's main radio station. They broadcast a message: "We men of the Uganda Armed Forces have decided to take over power from Obote and hand it to our fellow soldier, Major General Id Amin Dada."

It's less of a coup, more of a confirmation. If there is resistance, a rearguard by a few Abote loyalists, it doesn't last long. In the confusion, Radio Uganda forgoes its usual programming to play a pop song on a loop for the rest of the day. My Boy Lollipop by Jamaican singer Millie Small.

A few hours later, boy Lollipop himself is riding into town at the wheel of his jeep. Tanks rolling in behind him, soldiers crammed on top, smiling, waving. The streets are lined with cheering crowds. The air is one of relief. The hated Abote has been deposed. Amin takes to Radio Uganda himself, assuring with great humility that he is just a soldier, there to hold the fort until there are new, free and fair elections.

At 30,000 feet over the Pacific, for Milton Abote there is a stark realisation. He can't go home. Amin's troops have also seized Entebbe Airport. His plane is diverted to Tanzania. The 1971 coup is both pre-emptive and reactive. It's not planned over a long period of time. It is an attempt by Amin and his supporters to prevent the disaster that would occur if Amin was arrested and then subsequently presumably the other officers around him are seeing trouble for themselves in their future as well.

You have this little constellation of West Nile and Nubian officers who essentially seize power overnight and take over the army, it's worth noting, because this is not a bunch of senior soldiers. This is Amin and essentially low-ranking soldiers. He doesn't command the support of any of the other senior officers in the Uganda army, some of whom come from different ethnic groups and some of whom are southerners. And so when they seize power, this tiny little constellation of officers now find themselves in this incredibly precarious position where they've got to decide, well, what's going to happen? Amin's going to be the figurehead.

They managed to get some other senior and respected civilian administrators to form a cabinet with Amin. So they kind of, again, improvising. They have this outward appearance to the world of a successful military coup, but actually what's happened is a tiny handful of officers have said they've taken over. And within the army itself, there are still thousands of soldiers who don't agree with it and aren't on board with it. And so actually that signals basically another year of conflict within the Ugandan army itself, which is where the sort of patterns of violence and repression really, really escalate and really kick off.

Outside the Parliament building, the decorations are still up. It's the tail end of the Christmas season. Someone waves a placard. Amin, our Christ. Idi Amin is Uganda's new saviour. There is a general sigh of relief on the part of the public. Making all the right noises as leader, Amin throws in some early treats. Freedom of religion, lower taxes, prosperity for all, what's not alike.

I remember, I remember that people cut down their banana trees and decorated their military trucks and the soldiers were friendly. In those days, we used to have one radio station and one TV station.

And the TV was in black and white. On my village, the indigenous people, maybe two or three people had television. But because the other person who had TV had a daughter whom I had gone to boarding school with, I could go and see. So we saw parading. I saw Idamid. I saw all these soldiers. I saw the love. I saw the embrace. Everything.

He is soon sworn in at an outdoor ceremony. "I will exercise the function of the head of government of the Republic of Uganda, so help me God," he declares with great solemnity. He seems true to his word. His first move is to release all political prisoners, including the head of the Democratic Party, Benedicto Kiwanuka, the man falsely accused of an attempt on Obote's life. Amin makes him Chief Justice.

Then a leading army officer, Brigadier Oplot, an old rival of Amin's, is released. Alongside assorted Bagandan dignitaries, Amin dismantles the hated GSU, Obote's security service. He reassures his adoring public, Dr. Obote will come back to Uganda as a citizen of Uganda, but not as a president of the Republic of Uganda, he says.

He over-exited a little. He claims that a raid on Obote's house has uncovered a cache of munitions, rocket launchers, the works. From his exile in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam, Obote retorts that all Amin will have turned up is 700 books and my underpants. But Obote is old news, and then the most popular move of all,

Amin declares that there will be a state funeral for the late Kabaka, Mutesa II, King Freddy, whose remains are to be flown home from London, where he's died in exile. Exiled, whisper it quietly, after Amin tried to kill him. Shortly after he came to power in 1971, he made a series of speeches around Uganda in January, February that year,

in which he spoke in relatively fluent Luganda about his upbringing, claiming to be a person of Kampala, claiming to have been born in Kampala, claiming that his mum was a Muganda person, and claiming identity in some sense with Ganda people. This was a powerful political move for Amin.

First of all, it's worth saying that Milton Obote didn't speak Luganda with any clarity. Idi Amin did. He asserted that he was going to restore the power and prestige of the Ganda kingdom, which had been abolished by the previous administration.

Over the course of the 1970s, he sort of played around with his life story. He conducted a very powerful public ceremony for the burial of his father. The funeral rites were conducted in northern Uganda in Koboko, which Amin identified as his father's house, and he's buried there now. It's not clear that that was, in fact, Idi Amin's father. It was a way of kind of convening Ugandans and generating a certain kind of sympathy, a relationship, an emotional relationship between himself and Ugandans.

Amin goes on a goodwill tour of the country. He addresses ecstatic crowds at huge outdoor rallies. He promises better homes, jobs, a more Afrocentric way of running things. He makes jokes. He joins in with the tribal dancers. He shadow boxes with ecstatic local kids. So different to the miserable older Bote, they cry. Amin from day one was a flamboyant, very flamboyant person.

The way he spoke English was very funny to us. So we loved his English because he broke all the rules we would have otherwise been beaten for breaking. He was just funny. He was making lots of promises. There was a lot of insecurity. There was a lot of hatred. We lived under curfew. There were a lot of thugs and thieves.

There's two sides for Ugandan audiences to the president. On the one hand, the kind of jolly uncle

On the other hand, tyrannical figure who commanded fear and whose orders had to be obeyed instantaneously. Amin enjoyed calling his government a government of action. Ugandan officials in the provinces had to respond immediately to orders given over Radio Uganda

orders which were conveyed through the radio station about very specific matters in the provinces that local officials had to pursue immediately. And there's a kind of anxiety among local officials about what it would mean for local officials to thwart Idi Amin. We all have to listen to this radio every day because there may be a bit of a speech that the president gives which offers direction for us and our little principality that we have to enact immediately.

Idi Amin's supporters even give him a nickname, Big Daddy. In Kampala, in April, King Freddy's funeral is a huge event. The late Kabaka is laying in state in a glass coffin, then buried with pomp and circumstance. Full military honours. Even the Grenadier Guards are flown in. My grandfather walked more than 23 kilometres to come and line up.

It might be a funeral, but for Amin, Big Daddy, saluting the coffin with full solemnity, ceremonial sword at his hip,

It's as much a coronation. Amin sticks to his mantra and reiterates it to a TV interviewer. I am not ambitious of standing for power. My job is that I want to hand over the government to somebody who is coming. That's what I want. And then I can go back to saluting him and obeying his orders.

Gondan people regard him in almost messianic terms. There is an incident in which a visiting British ex-soldier spends time with Idi Amin in his office in February 1971, and a crowd of Gondan musicians comes dancing up the driveway with a big painting of Idi Amin with a halo circumventing his head. Amin welcomes them into the sitting room. They sing and perform for him, and he puts the painting right in the central place.

The Western powers seem quite keen on Amin too. British Prime Minister Edward Heath is one of the first world leaders to recognize him. The Brits were convinced that Amin was their ally. He had come up through the ranks of the colonial military.

So Amin at the funeral of the kabaka wears a tie which apparently features the British flag on it. This is an occasion in which, and God Save the Queen is played any number of times at the funeral, it's an occasion in which the British see, like, here's evidence to show that Amin is on our side in this battle for the heart and minds of Africans after the fall of the British Empire in Africa. On its front page, Britain's Daily Telegraph declares, Good riddance to Abote.

The Times adds that he was no longer worth protecting. Things will surely be better under this new leadership, especially for those old colonial stakeholders who still have business interests in Uganda. Professor Mariam Mufti. I think one of the reasons Idi Amin's rise to power was welcomed by the British was because he agreed to not nationalize British holdings. That was a very important economic incentive for the British at the time.

Milton Abote is known as a lefty, so-called lefty. Not that he was trying to be overly socialist or anything like that, but he wanted to nationalize British health property and he wanted to redistribute it amongst the Black population of Uganda. But it was a misstep. It was a misstep because

It ended up making Idi Amin look good to the British. He is seen as someone that the British thought they could control. They did not realize that this is a man who would actually untether himself and go off on his own path of ruling Uganda. The Israelis, and indeed the Americans, give him the thumbs up. Why is this significant? Because Amin, though Muslim,

has been aided and abetted by the Israeli security services, principally by way of an advisor, a man named Colonel Baruch Barlev, who's been very influential behind the scenes. There's a strategic motive here. In the broader region where Uganda abuts the Arab world, it's seen as important by Israel to have a friendly African nation. Israeli engineers jet in to help repurpose Uganda's shaky infrastructure. In July, on his first official state visit,

I mean, even heads to Israel, where, music to the ears of the public there, he proclaims that the Ugandan embassy will be based in Jerusalem. He's given a gift: honorary Israeli parachute wings, which featured Pride of Place on his uniform. From Tel Aviv, Big Daddy flies on to London, unannounced, and drops in on the Queen, causing a frantic reshuffling of the Royal Diary and a hasty reception at Buckingham Palace.

He confesses to Her Majesty that his visit is merely the pretext for a shopping expedition. London is the only place he can get size 14 shoes. Big Daddy, the playful joker, has reporters eating out of his hands. His Kampala press conferences are practically stand-up comedy shows. In Britain there's even the wry indulgence of the whiskey run. Each week a government plane lands at London's Stansted Airport.

It returns to Uganda laden with booze, cigarettes, Savile Row suits, golf clubs, assorted luxury items, mechanical spare parts, sometimes whole limousines. Even Amin's new secret police force, the State Research Bureau, seem harmless enough, dressed as they are in loud shirts, leather jackets and aviator shades. But there are clues as to the way things are going to shape up, just a week after the coup.

On February 2nd, Amin reappoints himself Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Uganda Army Chief of Staff and Chief of Air Staff. The entire Ugandan military, not just the army, is now under his complete control. Next, he announces that he's suspending huge chunks of the Ugandan constitution. The country will be run not by parliament but by an advisory defense council

It's comprised solely of senior military officers, with himself as chairman. Military law will supersede civil law. Uganda's citizens will be subject to military tribunals. Civil servants will defer to military codes. Order must be restored, after all, and under military governance, order is everything. But by March, Amin has made it patently clear as to the new state of play.

Democratic rule will not be reinstated for at least five years. For the people of Uganda, Big Daddy is now their big dictator. Amin sets up shop in his new official residence, the Presidential Lodge. He changes its name to the Command Post. This feels like someone about to declare war. But on whom? The most obvious antagonist is sitting right there across the border, in Tanzania, Milton Obote.

protesting his innocence and imploring his supporters to take up his cause. Therein, for Uganda's Langi and Acholi people, lies the problem. For if Idi Amin can't get at Abote personally, he can attack the very power base to whom Abote is appealing. There are substantial numbers of Langi and Acholi within Amin's own army. He now paints them as fifth columnists.

Right after Amin comes to power, Langi soldiers in the Uganda army were executed in large numbers. Several hundred Langi soldiers died in the first week after the Amin government came to power. A visiting journalist reported that Langi and some Acholi soldiers were being lined up and shot.

And Langi politicians respond to this by entreating the president to show mercy, overlook their past wrongs. They distance themselves from Milton Obote. Langi young men were crossing the border in numbers to join Milton Obote in exile in Tanzania. The Amin government was pursuing these exiles. And so, you know, the first year of Amin's government in Lang'o was a very tense time.

Through these killings, the die is cast.

By the time you get to 1972, the violence that has been committed in Amin's name is such that there is no way back. It's way past that. One of the recurring questions in African politics is why do African leaders stay in power so long? Why does this happen over and over? And one of the big answers is think about what happens to you when you leave. For Amin, that's got to be as big a factor in the decision to stay on indefinitely as his own desire to be president. You hit a sort of point of no return in some ways. By early 1972,

It's estimated that up to 5,000 Langi and Acholi soldiers have been killed. It's become a full-on purge. Stories do the rounds, that he ordered 36 leading officers to report for special training and had them bayoneted to death. That a group of officials seconded to inspect some tanks were deliberately run over by them, crushed.

that Senior Langhi and a Choli Top Brass were invited to a meeting only to have the doors locked and live grenades thrown in. There are other rumours that Brigadier Suleiman Hussein, the man charged by Obote with arresting Idi Amin just before the coup, has not only been arrested and beaten to death in Luzira prison, but that Amin keeps the Brigadier's severed head in his kitchen freezer, that he brings it out at dinner parties, shocking his guests.

berating it, throwing cutlery at it. But we will revisit this later. By July 1971, alarm bells are ringing internationally. When a British reporter questions Amin about the suggestions of mass killings, he dismisses the remark as impudent. The BBC spreads many false rumours, he says. But the evidence is growing. Within three months of taking power, the size of Idi Amin's army doubles. It's increasingly northern and Muslim in complexion.

to southern Ugandans. It's beginning to feel like an occupying force. It's not just the BBC. Many leading news organizations are getting the cold shoulder in Idi Amin's Uganda. It's hard to know what's really going on. Two American reporters decide to see for themselves. Their names are Nicholas Stroh and Robert Seidl. They drive to Mbarara Barracks to investigate the alleged killings there.

It's a swift and fatal lesson that press freedom is not something to be tolerated in the new Uganda. At Mbarara they're thrown in the guardhouse and bludgeoned to death. Their bodies are then hastily buried, later dug up again, burned and tossed in a river. Their car is heaved into a mountain gorge.

There are attempts at denials, attempts at cover-ups, which don't work. So it comes to light that these two men have certainly been killed. This is highly likely to have been a case of the local initiative of a few soldiers who didn't like being questioned. But Amin definitely covers for these guys, denies everything. And this is the beginnings of the shift in international perception of Amin. People start describing and categorizing what's happening as human rights abuses and in human rights terminology. He becomes one of the first big villains of the human rights era.

Amin is not personally responsible for this double murder. He happens to be out of the country at the time, as he often is when scandal is afoot. But this is the sort of thing that is now happening on his watch. His alleged illiteracy, or at least his reluctance to write things down, does have an advantage. There is never a paper trail. His standard order when dealing with an opponent is to give them the VIP treatment. It's a statement that can be interpreted by underlings in whatever way they choose.

Finding external enemies, someone to blame, will be a constant feature of Idi Amin's rule. If the love in with the West has helped endorse his leadership, it's one that doesn't last very long. In hindsight, there is a possibility, with assurances of good behavior, that Amin might have ridden this period out. But his impulses get the better of him.

A mean sudden and dramatic reversal with regard to Britain and Israel, his two most ardent backers, is to have huge consequences for the way things are to play out. The relationship between Uganda and Israel goes back a long way. At the turn of the 20th century, as bizarre as it sounds, Uganda was actually put forward as a potential location for a new Jewish homeland. Britain even offered up 5,000 square miles for this new state. The offer was taken seriously.

hotly debated at the 6th Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903. Ultimately it was voted down. The decision was Palestine or nothing. Now, 69 years later, after years of mutual respect, Ugandan-Israeli relations are deteriorating fast. Idi Amin's position on Israel starts to shift in February 1972 when he visits Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. Gaddafi is willing to bankroll Amin to the tune of billions of dollars.

He is also an avowed anti-Zionist. On the same trip, Idi Amin makes a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Saudis give him a swift lesson, a correction, as to the accepted attitudes towards Israel and towards colonialists. They also give him a new private jet, a fancy medal, and 54 million shillings for his defence fund. Dr. Mark Leopold

He appeared to be favouring the Israelis in terms of their influence over the government in the 1960s, basically as a way of getting more material from the Brits. And similarly, he said to the Israelis, if you don't give me what I want, I'll get it from the Brits. He threatened to go to the Russians or the Chinese for what he wanted for the army if neither the Israelis or the British gave him it.

This was a kind of constant jockeying and playing off of these Western forces against each other. I think, in a way, the Israelis had outlived their use. His main contact, perhaps his Israeli friend, was Colonel Barlev, who was leaving Uganda at that point anyway and going back home.

And I think we have to understand the move towards Muslim states in the context of the time. There was the oil price boom. The oil producing countries were getting more and more powerful. Throwing away the Americans and the Brits and lumping yourself in with Saudi Arabia and Libya from today's perspective seems a completely crazy thing to do. But it wasn't so crazy at that time.

Plus, I think there was the genuine link through his Muslim faith. There are some new friends, too, in the shape of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO. Amin declares that Uganda's foreign policy will now be directed against Israel. So the Israelis initially thought, well, this is Amin being influenced by Gaddafi. It doesn't reflect his own interests. But quickly, it becomes clear that Amin, in some senses, changed his position in public life.

On the 23rd of March 1972, Amin ordered the Israeli community in Uganda to pack up its bags and to leave the country. 700 Israelis were given four days to leave Uganda. The Israeli embassy was packed up, Israeli military advisers were rounded up at the point of a gun and obliged to hand over their weapons to Ugandan soldiers. And thereafter, Amin identified himself

with the Palestinians, arguing that Ugandans and Palestinians shared a set of interests on the basis of their experience in being colonized. So Amin, in fact, offered to send the Uganda army to fight with the Palestinians and the Egyptians against the Israelis. He offered himself to go and fight in the Middle East theater. He holds training exercises in Uganda.

I mean, these are all aspects of this larger interest in Amin's part in portraying Uganda as a kind of frontline state in the war against apartheid, imperialism and Zionism. With the Israelis dealt with, Amin turns back to the old imperial oppressors. In an almost side issue now, British workers in Uganda are told to take a 40% pay cut. Amin commandeers several large tea estates.

Life does not seem rosy for the 3,000 British expats still living there. All this, though, will soon be eclipsed by an even bigger shake-up of the old colonial order. Amin has expunged the enemy without. Next, he will fix his attention on a group which he considers to be the enemy within. In the next episode of Real Dictators,

In a speech, Amin makes an extraordinary announcement, something he claims came to him in a dream. All Ugandans of Asian origin are to leave the country. They have just 90 days to do so. They must sell up their homes, their shops, their businesses, and go. Now they must do whatever it takes to make it out alive. Meanwhile, out in the countryside, the murders continue.

In response, an army of exiles prepares to march into Uganda to launch the first serious attempt on Idi Amin's rule. That's next time on Real Dictators.